'Minority' label worth revisiting.

• Author: Schwab, Robert
• Position: On Colorado

THREE YEARS AGO, COLORADOBIZ wrote a cover story that declared the death of affirmative action in Colorado. One of its key points was that ethnic-minority owners of businesses in Colorado no longer wanted their firms to be designated as minority-owned because the designation worked against the firms' ability to get business.

Our magazine and the writer of the story, Pete Lewis, won an award for it.

In this issue, Allen Best writes about a possible resurrection of an affirmative-action program (page 25). It's the City of Denver's plan to direct some of the millions of dollars worth of work the city pays for each year to minority-owned business contractors: from technology service firms to building contractors.

Between the two issues of our magazine, the size of our statewide annual list of minority-owned businesses has shrunk from 100 in 2001, to 75 in 2002, to 50 in 2003 and 50 again this year. The decline pretty much tracks the downturn in the Colorado economy.

Joe Mena, the founder and owner of Summit Container Corp., which is ranked No. 22 on this year's list and has been listed each of those years, complained to me last year that trimming the list by half over the past three years gives a bad impression of minority business. He's promised to come to this year's 10th annual ColoradoBiz Minority Business Breakfast on July 22 because it's important to him to have at least 50 top Colorado, minority-owned businesses represented.

It may be the last breakfast we host for minority-owned businesses because the dwindling list and the difficulty of soliciting businesses to file for it has convinced some people at the magazine that designation as a "minority," is anachronistic, out-of-date.

Their argument goes back to the key point of our 2001 story: Ethnic-minority business owners often don't identify themselves as such.

Mena says the primary reason the number of minority-owned companies are not submitting their financial information, which is required in order to rank the firms, has a lot to do with the bad economic years Colorado has suffered over the past three.

Mike Taylor, our managing editor who compiles our lists, reported this year that many businesses he tried to contact to invite them to join were unavailable by phone since many of their phones had been disconnected. Other people confirmed to Taylor that Mena's take on the difficulty of finding list applicants was correct: Revenues were down in 2003 compared with the past, so they didn't...